1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to displaying information through a browser window at a client computer system connected to a network, and more specifically to enabling a user to go back from a currently displayed page to a previously displayed page even though there may have been forwarder pages in-between.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computational devices continue to proliferate throughout the world, there also continues to be an increase in the use of networks connecting these devices. Computational devices include large mainframe computers, workstations, personal computers, laptops and other portable devices including wireless telephones, personal digital assistants, automobile-based computers, etc. Such portable computational devices are also referred to as “pervasive” devices. The term “computer” or “computational device”, as used herein, may refer to any of such device which contains a processor and some type of memory.
The computational devices may be connected in any type of network including the Internet, an intranet, a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN). The networks connecting computational devices may be “wired” networks, formed using lines such as copper wire or fiber optic cable, wireless networks employing earth and/or satellite-based wireless transmission links, or combinations of wired and wireless network portions. Many such networks may be organized using a client/server architecture, in which “server” computational devices manage resources, such as files, peripheral devices, or processing power, which may be requested by “client” computational devices. “Proxy devices” can act on behalf of other machines, such as either clients or servers.
A widely used network is the Internet. The Internet, initially referred to as a collection of “interconnected networks”, is a set of computer networks, possibly dissimilar, joined together by means of gateways that handle data transfer and the conversion of messages from the sending network to the protocols used by the receiving network. When capitalized, the term “Internet” refers to the collection of networks and gateways that use the TCP/IP suite or protocols.
Currently, the most commonly employed method of transferring data over the Internet is to employ the World Wide Web environment, referred to herein as “the Web”. Other Internet resources exist for transferring information, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher, but have not achieved the popularity of the Web. In the Web environment, servers and clients effect data transfer using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a known protocol for handling the transfer of various data files (e.g., text, still graphic images, audio, motion video, etc.).
A Web browser is a software program running at a client computer system that displays Web pages from the Internet. The Web browser displays the information by interpreting the markup language (e.g., Hypertext Markup Language, HTML; Wireless Markup Language, WML; Extensible Markup Language, XML; Standard Generalized Markup Language, SGML, etc.) used to build home pages on the Web. The coding in a markup language file tells the browser how to display the text, graphics, links and multimedia files on the home page. If the browser itself is unable to display the file, the browser may utilize a plug-in, such as a multimedia player or audio player, to present the file to the user. The Web browser also interprets HTML tags within the HTML document as links to other Web sites, or to Web resources, such as graphics, multimedia files, news groups, or files to download.
Sometimes these links to other Web sites automatically produce advertisements that appear on the user's display. The browser opens another window to show the advertisement content. These advertisements appear to “pop-up” on the user's display screen in separate windows automatically by the browser. It is not uncommon for one advertising window to contain links to other advertising content such that a succession of browser windows are being generated. Needless to say, this can be annoying to users.
Another technique used by advertisers and others that tends to annoy users is the effective redefinition of the “Go Back” feature of the browser through the use of hidden forwarder pages. A forwarder page does nothing more than automatically forward the browser to another page without requiring any user interaction. As such, the forwarder page might not ever be displayed to the user; or if it is, it is only for a very short time. Sometimes the length of time that the page is displayed is so short that the user does not notice that it is being displayed; especially if the content of the forwarder page is empty.
This tactic of employing forwarder pages to get to an advertiser's displayed page makes it difficult for a user to leave the advertiser's displayed Web page. For example, a user currently displaying page P selects a link to what is thought to be page Q. Instead, the link sends the browser to a forwarder page, F1. Page F1 automatically sends the browser to page Q without user interaction and without displaying any information. When the user attempts to go back to page P from page Q, the “Go Back” feature, when selected on the browser by the user, actually sends the browser to page F1 which automatically, without any user interaction, takes the user to page Q again. This effectively disables the “Go Back” feature since the user cannot get back to page P from page Q. As such, the user becomes stuck on page Q. If the user quickly clicks the “Go Back” feature multiple times in rapid succession, it may be possible to avoid page F1. However, if there is more than one intervening forwarder page, rapid clicking will still get the user back to one of the intervening forwarder pages, and then automatically back to the page the user tried to leave. As such, if a sequence of forwarder pages, F1 through Fn, are defined, it can be difficult to get back to page P.
For example, assume there were five forwarder pages, A, B, C, D, E. If a user clicks on a link in the current page, the current page would go to A then automatically to page B which would automatically go to page C which would automatically go to page D which would automatically go to page E in succession. Page E may then go to the page that the user intended to link to. Since the succession of these forwarded pages occurs so quickly, the user only perceives going from the current page to the desired link. However, if the user tried to click on the “Back” button on the browser, the browser would go back to the forwarder page and that page would take you right back, automatically, to the same page that the user tried to go back from.
It should be noted that the above problem is not limited to advertising windows. The problem also occurs intentionally, or unintentionally, by other Web page owners. For example, a Web page owner may decide to change its original home page. Instead of removing the original home page, the Web page owner changes it so that it forwards the user to a different home page. As such, when the original home page is referenced using the same URL, the different home page will appear instead of the original home page. However, if the user wanted to get back to where the user was before going to that home page, the user would be returned automatically to the different home page from the original home page now performing as a forwarder.